The Real Country: People

During the nineteenth century, paintings depicting ‘real’ life of ordinary people became increasingly popular, first in what has become known as social realism, pioneered by Jean-François Millet, then Naturalism, championed by Jules Bastien-Lepage until his untimely death in 1884. Among other themes, these put the case for the rural poor, and the desperate poverty that those living in the country had to endure.

Look carefully at many of their paintings, though, and the underlying stories aren’t as simple. One of the most evident problems is that many of those campaigning paintings used models who had been carefully posed. Look at their hands, feet and hair and you’ll often see someone who appears remarkably clean and kempt with no evidence of prolonged and arduous manual labour, even clothes that lack the dirt and mud so typical of those who work and walk on unpaved tracks and ploughed fields.

At the same time, photographic portraits of the poor became popular among some who sought to advance the art of photography. There are some notorious examples of early photographers who were caught posing carefully selected models in deliberately misleading circumstances, demonstrating how the camera can be made to lie.

My small selection of paintings of country people from the nineteenth century is an attempt to show some that appear most faithful records that weren’t intended to support political views or attract praise at a Salon.

Jules Breton (1827–1906), Young Girl Knitting (2) (1860), oil on canvas mounted on panel, 36 × 30 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Jules Breton had been born and brought up in the rural village of Courrières, and returned there to paint intimate portraits of those who continued to live there, including this Young Girl Knitting, seen in 1860. Many of these intimate works were sold to private collectors and have never been seen at exhibition.

Jules Breton (1827–1906), Mother Feeding her Baby (1863), oil on canvas, 55.2 x 45.1 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

His portrait of this Mother Feeding her Baby from 1863 shows her wearing clogs, and clothing that has seen better days. She is feeding a very young baby in front of a frugal fire in what can only be her normal domestic conditions.

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville (1871), oil on cardboard, 80 × 55.6 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-François Millet had been born in the village of Gruchy, and was the first child of a farming family. Although his portrait of A Norman Milkmaid at Gréville from 1871 lacks fine detail to reinforce its authenticity, she’s clearly grubby and wasn’t painted in the studio.

Max Liebermann (1847–1935), The Preserve Makers (1879), oil on mahogany wood, 49 × 65.3 cm, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.

Max Liebermann’s The Preserve Makers from 1879 shows a shed full of country women preparing foodstuffs for bottling and canning; the latter gradually came into use after 1810, but didn’t become popular until the First World War. This shows well the light factory work that was introduced to country areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the women who provided its labour force.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929), An Accident (1879), oil on canvas, 90.7 x 130.8 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Wikimedia Commons.

Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s An Accident from 1879 is an exception among these, in that it was not only submitted to the Salon of 1880, but won the artist a first-class medal. It was also supposedly painted from memory, showing an incident that the artist witnessed with a medical friend who was similarly called to assist with an injury.

Despite that, it shows a country doctor cleaning and bandaging the injured hand of a boy, as the rest of the extended family looks on. Conditions appear primitive: the small bowl of water is heavily blood-stained, and the cloth by it looks filthy. It’s also rich in detail that appears authentic, from the boy’s shoe compared with that of the doctor, to the bald man standing in front of a treasured grandfather clock in the right background.

Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884), Pas Mèche (Nothing Doing) (1882), oil on canvas, 132.1 x 89.5 cm, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. Wikimedia Commons.

Of Bastien-Lepage’s many portraits of country people, his Nothing Doing from 1882 appears the most convincing. From his unlaced mud-caked boots to his filthy and frayed waistcoat, this young agricultural worker looks the part. Bastien had spent his childhood in the village of Damvillers, although he was the son of a local artist. He frequently returned to his home village to paint local characters, such as this boy.

Jules Breton (1827–1906), Song of the Lark (1884), oil on canvas, 110.6 × 85.8 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Wikimedia Commons.

The young woman in Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884) has detailed features that appear true to life, in her bare feet with grubby and battered toenails, and hands that have seen hard work with the hook she holds.

Évariste Carpentier (1845–1922), The Turnip Washer (1890), oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm, Musée des beaux-arts de Liège, Liège, Belgium. Wikimedia Commons.

Évariste Carpentier had been born into a farming family near the small town of Kuurne in Belgium. The Turnip Washer from 1890 is among the last of his thoroughly Naturalist paintings. Alongside the farmyard birds, two figures are busy washing piles of turnips in a small and dirty pond.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), The Farmworkers’ Supper (1913), pastel on paper, dimensions and location not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Throughout the career of Léon Augustin Lhermitte he painted the working lives of farmworkers and country people. In his pastel of The Farmworkers’ Supper from 1913, he shows those who have been working outdoors during the long day enjoying a meal at its end.

Together these paintings build a dispassionate image of a countryside that might have been lacking in worldly goods, but was hardly starved and pestilent. And, as I’ll show in the next and concluding article, at times rural life could still be idyllic.